Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Sunday, October 30, 2005

It's a losing proposition, and one they should refuse. It's the
Politics of Politics. It's the Slim-Fast Blues. -- Glenn Frey

Los Angeles Dodger G.M. Paul DePodesta got fired yesterday
after two seasons of a five year contract. He's been a lightning
rod for the Bitgod contingent (Back in the Good
Old Days) of baseball execs and reporters who pine
for the social structures of the past, and for two reasons. One,
he wasn't perceived as having "paid his dues". Two, he
was featured heavily & praised in Michael Lewis' book Moneyball
which the Bitgods found offensive.

There are key management lessons in this event. This is the
first one.

Creating Change Causes Corporate Crises,
Especially in a Political Environment
DePodesta is a manager with a strong bias for change and
a great skill at conceiving it. As he said in his now-no-longer
available corporate lecture on management, to successfully manage
and push change, you have to change the changes you deploy, even
as you're concurrently fighting to install them in the first
place. One of the reasons the Oakland A's team DePodesta came
from before getting the Dodger job has been consistently strong
relative to their player budget is that they never fell into the
trap of a rigid plan. Moneyball showed a moment, a frame
in the moving picture of their plan, a frame that both the Bitgod
side and some Beaniacs debate, each from their own side...still.
Even though the A's passed that frame a couple of reels back.

DePodesta really understands Change, something I wrote about
in a four part series starting with this one. But while you can make amazing
things happen by driving change, in almost every organization,
baseball or not, you will trigger immune responses:

people who either fear specific changes that undermine
them, or

fear change in general, or

people who are made uncomfortable by having to change.

In a complex, compound organization, change causes personal
crises -- at least if it's going to work it has to. And interest
groups, both ad hoc and departmental, will firm up
"political" opposition. You can count on it. The more
unhealthy or in-flux the organization is, the higher the
political resistance.

In the Dodger case, the resistance is centered around Tom
Lasorda, the ultimate Bitgod. For him, the fight is not so much
ideological as it is personal. Sure, he favors the model
that he cut his teeth on and managed in; that's perfectly natural
if not always functional. But his own political power base within
the Dodgers is in the process and people who were paramount in
the old pre-DePodesta model the young G.M. was committed to
change.

BEYOND BASEBALL
You will always face this resistance in a large organization. The
larger the organization is, the less accountability there is --
it's easier for the manager who favors politics over the mission
to "hide out" or lurk without great results of one's
own to point to. As an organization grows, not only can such
people hide from their lack on contribution more easily, but they
are more likely to get their way in hiring decisions, replicating
their cognitive DNA.

The solution to pursue is what I call
accountability-glueing...designing and enforcing
vigorously, every day, the attachment of accountability to all
decisions and pushing for hiring decisions that prevent them
replicating themselves. Both undermine the politicals and
discomfit them, not only making it somewhat less likely they'll
succeed in any given campaign, but also makes them somewhat more
likely to move to an organization that has an environment that's
more appealing to them.

If there's a complete breakdown, the worst decision you can
make is to do nothing. The 2005 Dodgers were not that case. The
2005 Dodgers were a team that followed the 2004 model that made
the playoffs, one that sputtered and struggled with a lot of
young players growing up on the job.

In the absence of a complete breakdown, the worst decision you
can make in the middle of a change initiative is to dump
it...reboot and start from scratch before you've given the change
initiative a chance to deliver feedback on whether it's likely to
succeed. Every one has its own necessary length. For a couponing
or discount program, it might be ten days; for the Dodgers
re-design, the front office team needed four to six years. The
2004 data point (getting into the playoffs) could have been seen
as a positive (hmm, progress made already) or neutral (nice
season, but too early to tell). But neurotically, it has somehow
been turned into a negative, a weapon used against the change
team ("we're looking at failure"). .Just as the 2004
success story built on the previous front office leadership of
Dan Evans, the 2006 Dodger team benefits from being built on this
2005 experience. The new G.M. coming in can continue the change
(with the possibility of adjustments or fine-tuning) which makes
it pretty goofy to have fired DePodesta), or the new G.M. can
throw away the blueprint and start over with a new one (which
resets the building process back a year or two while decisions
re-shape the organization, which undermines the very need for
immediate gratification the owners were seeking in firing
DePodesta).

Having committed to a hire like DePodesta in early 2004, an
office purge in response to internal politics is a losing
proposition, and one the owners should have refused. It was hard
for them for reasons I'll discuss as the next management lesson
in this firing.

UPDATE: I just read Jon Wiesman's super-perceptive description of the Dodger models during their time in Los Angeles. I strongly recommend it, not just for the extraordinarily informative insight it provides, but because it'll add value to the other lessons I'll be writing about.

10/30/2005 10:31:00 AM posted by j @ 10/30/2005 10:31:00 AM

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Book Review: Mind GameHow Management Designed the Red Sox' Victory

The Baseball Prospectus team delivered their most recent book
last month, a 350+ page collection of essays on the Boston Red
Sox' drive to the 2005 World Series trophy and supporting
statistical tables. It's a truly enjoyable read for existing BP
fans and Sox fans who would like a wonky and detailed history of
the team built to put The Curse in a hearse. It's called Mind
Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series and
Created a New Blueprint for Winning (Workman Publishing: New
York, $13.95).

The short of it: It's a very worthwhile book you'll definitely
want to own, but it probably won't find a place on your
permanent shelf.

Assembled out of permutations of 19 authors and an
author/editor, Steven "Double Duty" Goldman, Mind
Game delivers 25+ chapters that cover various aspects of the
Bosox' 2005 season, roughly chronologically. The crew takes on
specific subjects from background history, to individual people
on the roster (with chapters on Pedro Martínez, Nomar
Garciaparra and David Ortiz, for example), statistical analysis
of various aspects of the game and how the Sox ranked, and how
the front office assembled the team, why it assembled it this
way, and how they tried to make adjustments as the season
progressed.

In doing that, they provide the most detailed examination of
the management decisionmaking that developed the strategy, the
roster built on that strategy and the decisions they had to make
as a result of change. From an MBB perspective, while the authors
don't pay any special attention to drawing out lessons for us to
apply in our non-baseball endeavors, some little pieces surface
anyway.

The challenge of assembling such a populous team spread over a
continent and knitting together the content is a challenging one,
much like Diderot faced in assembling the Encyclopedia, though Diderot took 30
years, and in 1780, which was even before Julio Franco was
playing, they had no e-mail. But Goldman still deserves
laurels for assembling and editing this volume.

I do have a quibble: the book bears conceptual sprawl. In
several sections it looks like the work was designed to be a
novice's introduction to sabermetric principles using the 2005
Bosox campaign as a backdrop. That would have been a great idea
and it works when they do it. At other times it looks like a way
to promote BP's special sauce, the core set of signature stats
they use such as VORP and MLVr and WXRL, the ones the community
identifies as theirs. That would have been an interesting idea,
and it generally works when they do that, although some of the
explanations will be over the heads of readers who haven't
marinated themselves in statistical analysis before. There are
other essays that fit neither model. The work's varying
foundations don't undo its value, but it seems like an
opportunity lost, an opportunity to pick out one of those
approaches and make a work that would be an all-time classic.

The chapters include some total jewels, brain candy of the
first order:

Goldman's chapter on the history of the Red Sox between
the Series wins, The Banality of Incompetence
1919-2002, is a superb short history, written with
the author's usual incomparable style and original
insight.

The chapter on relief pitching, contrasting the Sox' pen
with the Yankees' is both solid writing and interesting
research, as penned by Derek Zumsteg, and it's brightly
complemented by Dave Pease's long sidebar on Calvin
Schiraldi and one-year reliever fluke seasons.

Deconstructing Pedro, Jay Jaffe's lively
recounting of the Boston ace's mano-a-tetes with
the Yankees (or was that Don Zimmer's steel plate?)
documents the reality that can so easily get buried in
feature-writers' tsunami of vapidity.

Will Carroll's gristly explication on the medical
condition that brought Curt Schilling down and the
experimental procedure that brought him back for a little
is great writing of Stephen Jay Gould quality: it
explains things we don't know and probably never imagined
wanting to know about in minute detail and is
completely gripping.

The lessons for managers outside baseball are not made
explicit (that's not the BP guys' mission). There are two
chapters that are dense with lessons, the Goldman chapter on the
Sox' history, and Shopping for Winners, a solid Jonah
Keri & Chris Kahrl exploration of how the Sox and Yanks put
their teams together. There are many small pieces loosely joined
across the book you might synthesize into ideas of your own. But
there's not one single place where they put together all the elements
the front office used to craft this blueprint for winning the way
they focus a chapter on defense or relief pitching.

I think if you either like data analysis or you want to like
it, you'll find Mind Game an absorbing & stimulating
read. It the numbers turn you off, there are significant parts of
the book you'll enjoy anyway for the personality and Red Sox
history. Along with the goofy book about Tony LaRussa, Three
Nights in August, this is one of the two most informative
baseball books of the last year. Like the Sox, it's a winner.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Frank Robinson Gunned Down at Third: When What Made You Great Makes You Hate

Third Base in the MBB Model is self-awareness, part of which is coming to grips with the emotional settings we have but don't always know about consciously. They affect decisions sometimes in little ways (not taking seriously a job candidate who's wearing a tie that may have been fashionable two years ago but not now, presuming someone with a Southern accent is a Gomer, for example). Sometimes, it's in a big way. Sometimes a manager can incinerate his team's chances to make the playoffs because he can't control his emotional settings. Sometimes that manager is Frank Robinson.

Reader Doug Chapin pointed out to me and then documented how Frank Robinson, who managed this year's Washington Nationals (nee Montréal Expos) into wild card contention after years of adversity imploded his team's chances. Robinson has suffered in his managerial career from several small bigotries that have undermined his performance.

A little background: Robinson was one of the finest players ever to make the majors. He won a Rookie of the Year award (1956, for Cincinnati), a Gold Glove (1958, Cincinnati), Most Valuable Player awards in both leagues (Cincinnati in 1961, Baltimore in 1966). In 1966, he also became one of just 15 players in history to win the Triple Crown (led the league in batting average, homers and RBIs), and was MVP of the World Series too.

In short, he was an all-around player. He was born with great natural talents, and worked very hard to sharpen them. But until 2002, when he took over the Expos, he was a poor manager. Rico Carty, one of the better players on Robinson's 1975 and 1976 Cleveland teams, once told me that Robinson was really tough in his expectations of players. Robby was a five-tool all-star who found it hard to believe that if his players weren’t as good as he had been, they just weren’t trying hard enough. Robinson was one of the best 20 players in the history of the game. Using himself as the metre bar against which to measure skill was guaranteed to marinate Robinson in disappointment and his contributors in grief. Robbie was bigoted against the 99% of major league ballplayers who weren’t as good as he was. It’s a small bigotry in the big scheme, but one guaranteed to corrode both manager and staff.

BEYOND BASEBALLThis is typical among non-baseball managers who have a strong history of accomplishment. Their normal pattern is to see each fresh face as a savior, only to be disappointed when they discover the youngster can’t do everything they themselves can do. But organizational rosters, like most MLB rosters, will usually have a very few five-tool players mingled with role-players who excel at one or two of the many things they need to do. The Frank Robinson pattern may increase your ability to find the flaws in each player's game, but it brutally limits what you can and will do to help your organization help the player succeed within his limits and learn to exceed them.

AND BACK
It may have been age or special learning experiences or the just the fact that the Expos had such an eviscerated roster, but when Robinson inherited the Expos in in 2002, he was successful with them both in that year and the next. Were his expectations so low that he had to overcome his natural tendencies, or had he grown as a person and manager? I’d wanted to think it was the latter.

Thanks to a bizarre MLB ownership scheme intentionally designed to make the Expos dead meat and drive their fans to existential panic, the team was asphyxiated by an unrealistic budget, forced to travel on a maniacal schedule that incorporated two home parks 1,917 miles apart, in Canada and Puerto Rico, and had a really bad costumed mascot. Guaranteed to be awful, Robinson’s team collapsed in 2004, and in the off-season fled to Washington, D.C. With low expectations for 2005, the renamed Nationals started outperforming expectations, played steady ball, and owned the N.L. East’s best record (51-34) on July 7.

Then a different small bigotry showed itself. Frank Robinson hates pitchers. Or maybe he just acts that way. The very bigotry that made him a remarkable player (focusing lots of malicious analysis on those bustards who pitched to him) undermines him as a manager. After three bad outings, Claudio Vargas was waived. Waiving means you get nothing back, and Vargas was respectable enough to give Arizona, which picked him up, 100 adequate innings over the rest of the season.

Then Robinson feuded with Tomo Ohka, one of his better starters. That culminated in an incident where Robinson came out to the mound to remove Ohka and the pitcher committed gross public disrespect by turning his back on the manager as he approached. Management traded Ohka to Milwaukee on June 11, just a week Vargas's departure. The players became polarized by Robinson’s behavior. Some approved, some opposed, but the team was still performing. Then the team’s most promising young pitcher, Zach Day, was nailed for “insubordination.” Management banished him to Colorado (for pitchers, the equivalent of that creepy island in the TV show “Lost”).

And in early August the team waived pitcher “Sunny” Kim, again receiving nothing and again witnessing the banished pitcher putting decent numbers up for another team.

Okay, you think to yourself, the Nats had promising young starting arms in the farm system or got pitchers back in the transactions or picked up nice resources off other teams' waiver mistakes. None of the frelling above. As the penultimate skipper to lead a Chisox team to World Series Al Lopez knew, you never give up on a player until you know who you’re going to replace him with. Lopez knew that, you know it, but Robinson who knows it too chose to allow his bigotry against pitchers outweigh his respect of Lopez’ Law. Like a town after a Stalinist purge with no one left to teach school or make shoes or run the fire department, the roster didn’t have enough starters left. The Nats closed out the season with a 12-17 run that included Robinson kludging multiple relievers together as a stand-in for the fresh single starters he didn’t have on his roster because he had sent them all to the Pitcher Gulag.

Bigotry is a widespread reality. I know perfectly intelligent people who believe everyone on the planet is a bigot. It doesn’t matter here if they’re right or wrong — if you have bigotry about pitchers or ethnic groups or faiths or height or gender, just be aware of them and don’t allow yourself to act on them if they will undermine your pennant drive. And if you see it in other managers in your organization, point it out to them. The emotional setting you have may make you good. The way you use them to your advantage might make you great -- but a manager can't afford to let those gauze over his abilities to make the best use of his reources to achieve the organization's goals.

10/20/2005 06:17:00 AM posted by j @ 10/20/2005 06:17:00 AM

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Part II: In Scioscia's Words: People Who Think They Know All The A.s Haven't Asked the Right Questions

All men
dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty
recesses of their minds
wake in the day to find that it was vanity:
but the dreamers of the days are dangerous men, for they may act
their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. --
T.E.Lawrence

Last week I wrote about the that fact that
while the Los Angeles Angels' offense operated in a way contrary
to a numerically strongly-supported sabermetric approach, their
operation is very numbers-driven. It just happens to be based on
different numbers than the community usually works with or sees
as particularly valuable.

One of the reasons the community that shares the big
sabermetric tent doesn't examine some of the numbers the Angels
use is they're not widely available (for each batter, the number
of opportunities to go from 1st to 3rd on a single, for example).
That's a shame, of course -- while it works to the Halos
comparative advantage from a business intelligence (BI)
perspective to have the numbers and for them to be relatively
low-diffusion, as researchers it's not easy for us to marinate in
them long enough to verify, reject, refine or just have a
wholeheckofalotoffun with 'em. The team's data provider needs to
make money like the rest of the world -- it doesn't spray them
around the media, and media isn't demanding to pay for them.

Anyway, I have an entire philosophical essay in me on the
nature of sabermetric revolutions, evolutionary processes,
Counter-Reformations, the Thirty Years War, Punctuated
Equilibrium, the persistence of Taylorism, and Toad Ramsey,
triggered by the Baseball Think Factory discussion thread on Part
I of this topic. That will come in a Part III some day (I'm
on deadline for a book, and need to empty a backlog of client
work). For now though...

I mentioned I would excerpt some of the potentially
interesting pieces from the transcript of the discussion with the
interesting Angels skipper, Mike Scioscia. The tape was
unintelligible in some places when the background noise
overwhelmed the technology. I put the expressions in where his
words were missing; those words are my paraphrasing of what he
said, and those are in italic -- his expressions, my words.

JA: You won a WS, you
manage a team w/a very unusual profile for a SUCCESSFUL team.
I want to learn about it. Who were your mentors?

MS: First of all you never go through your childhood and
you never dream of being a manager or managing in the 7th
game of a World Series. You dont fantasize about that.
You fantasize about playing the game and thats what
this game is about. Ive been very fortunate to play it
at a high level and be part of World Championship teams.
& anything in this profession that I accomplish will be
secondary to that. Thats the thrill, the good or bad,
thats what its about. Theres a little bit
of a drop off when you stop playing the game, a little void
thatll never be filled. And I think once you come to
grips with that, youre going to be a much better coach
or manager.

Just thinking back, there are a few things that really
influenced me. I was very fortunate to be in the Dodger
organization with some great baseball minds. Roseboro,
Campanella, I can never thank those guys enough. Roy would
take me out on the field and hed just say a few things
and I always learned something from him. Walter Alston, Tom
Lasorda, John Roseboro.

And Tommy had a bench coach, Monty Basgall. And when Tom
was moving around, he just sat there calm and still.
It was his job to think the game. Its
important to remove the emotion from the consideration of
what to do. When something goes bad, you have to be the
anchor. As a manager, you have to separate your emotions from
your decisionmaking process.

JA: Any other influences?

MS: Yes, my parents. My mother was a schoolteacher and my
dad sold beer. He taught me that the foundation of dealing
with other people had to be respect and humor. Respect for
people, for institutions, for what youre doing (working
at).

He also taught me that people who think they know
everything havent asked the right question.

JA: So Lasorda had this
complementary bench coach, Monty Basgall, who would think the
game. How about you you are already thinking the game,
what do you look for in a bench coach?

Im looking for a bench coach who can think the
game., too. We have specialized coaches for other things
{snip}. But Joe Maddon is shadowing my decisions. I
thinking the game and he is, too.

JA: Thats like having
two managers.

MS: (laughs). Yes.

JA: So many managers played
catcher...

MS: When you play catcher, the most important part of the
game is to channel the flow of the game. That's what
a manager does,too. And the relationship between the pitcher
and catcher is a key to the game.

Theres a lot of talk about fundamentals. People will
say about fundamentals, Oh, its how the pitcher
covers first on an grounder to the 1st baseman'. But that
play may happen only once a game. The decision your catcher
and pitcher will work out happens 150 times a game.
Thats going to have more effect on the game. So that's
the fundamental aspect of the game on the field.

{snip}

At this point we talked
about walks and runners in motion, Scioscia's own lack of
speed during his career, Joe Torre's affection for carrying a
catcher who can't hit and what that may say about Torre's
psyche, and BeanebalL The tape was useless during that
stretch.

JA: So youre saying
you dont necessary choose the game, you manage the game
to the roster you have.

MS: Yes thats it. We manage with the roster we have.

I do think running the bases aggressively is something
that should be the tendency in every team. I do. I think the
Yankees do a great job. That aggressiveness is part of
baseball whether you believe in waiting for the 3-run homer
or not. Youre going to get a hell of a lot of
singles with a guy on first. No matter which team,
youre going to get a lot more singles than home runs.
If you can get that guy to third instead of to second
thats a lot better statistical position to be in. If
you can create more of those situations, youre going to
have more runs on the bottom line.

That has to be part of our program no matter who it is.
Bengie Molina. Hes not a fast runner. If there are only
ten balls a year he needs to get from 1st to 3rd on,
hed better be on third base on ten of them. You have to
apply yourself that way. And I think thats important in
our organization when you talk about our development,
thats lot of the {garbled} in our development. And when
you see a player come up here, that seeds been planted.

The results, the game we play, are going to be
based on what the player can do. If we get a guy like Dallas
MacPherson coming up who has the potential to hit 40 HRs,
were not going to play that game as much in front of
him as far as the hit and run. The straight steal is
different. Putting guys in motion.

But if you don't put our guys in motion, were not
going to get runs. Were not going to create the
situations we should.

JA: So you said 'create'.
You're not waiting to find opportunities, you're looking for
ways to create them.

MS: We cant manufacture on base, so we
cant afford to have any wither on the vine. Last
year, we went from 1st to 3rd {base} 99 times; we were thrown
out six times. Conversely, the Oakland Athletics who play a
very passive running game because they dont want to run
into outs went {from}1st to 3rd, I believe it was 31
times...you can get those numbers...and they got thrown out 4
times.

JA: Thats like your
stealing. Angel stealing is not just prolific, but
high-percentage.

MS: It has to be, as I said, our on base is like .325, so
how can we compete with a team that has on base of 350,
because theyre going to pressure you every inning,
theyre going to be out there. Weve got to do it
by maximizing the on base percentage we do have. We
cant let on base percentage die on the vine. Some of
those teams that have on base of .350 or .360, they can let
on base die on the vine because its going to be there
again. Ours is only going to be there .325 and youd
better grasp the opportunity when you can or theres
going to be stagnation. We hit few home runs, our slugging
percentage is down near the bottom of the league.

I could have conversed with him for a long time, but he'd
given me more time than he could spare already. We never touched
on pitching, of which he'd have had a lot more to say and have
been interesting about it, too. Very generous person, opinionated, a quick mind, a gentleman, knows how to have a real conversation.
Leonard Koppett would have found him fascinating and original.

SOME OF MY OBSERVATIONS1. He is a patient teacher, and I think he learned that
from his mother who was a teacher. I think there are advanatges
in and beyond baseball in having a manager who has that skill
set. Certainly, since the Angels are working this set of tactics
up and down the organization, systemically, then having a teacher
at the top to reinforce lessons is a very high-return choice.

2. His skeptical (in the Greek sense) observation model is of
great use to a manager in any competitive endeavor. He is set up
not to take any givens as eternally given.

3. He, as he says, "thinks the game".
He uses numbers to validate progress. Very
"left-brained", constantly measuring, balancing,
looking for an edge. Again, beyond baseball, this is a super code
of conduct in most management positions.

4. He has what appears to be a perfectly-balanced ego. He
didn't look for a Lasorda to be his bench coach, someone he could
delgate the emotional stuff to. He got another thinker to tap
into, a potential "competitor" to those with less
self-awareness, but a net addition to the in-game decisionmaking
and observation needed to be sharp. The theory they use on
offense absolutely requires close attention all the time because
there's not going to be a lot of margin in most of their victory
opportunities (if you doubt me, ask Josh Paul).

Again, I thank the Angels media relations staff for their
cheerful, professional attitude and efficient delivery, and
Scioscia for his time and thoughts. With luck, I'll get to have
that pitching conversation with him some time.

10/13/2005 09:53:00 AM posted by j @ 10/13/2005 09:53:00 AM

Monday, October 10, 2005

Bobby Cox & Phil Garner: Joe Ely's Take On When the Six-Shooters Are Empty

A manager
uses a relief pitcher like a six-shooter.
He fires it until it's empty and then takes the gun
and throws it at the bad guy -- Dan Quisenberry

For one thing, it literally was two games worth of innings,
decided in the bottom of the 18th. But managing a game through
the first seven innings and how you finish out a close game
require different mind sets and decisions. The parallels are like
they are in my buddy Martin Marshall's favorite management toy,
chess. For example, chess' "end game" is considered
quite a different set of skills from openings.

In an extended extra-inning game such as this classic, tactics
shift (I'll elaborate farther down on that for those who want a
refresher). Marshalling limited resources is almost a universal,
quotidian issue, but when the manager is in a situation that has
normal fluctuations, most days fall into a predictable range.
Every once in a while, everything goes sproing at work
and the manager has to figure out a way to keep the line running
or improvise for the rare,
you-know-you'll-get-it-sooner-or-later-but-not-often deviation
day. But the biggest difference is it's one of those situations
that in or out of baseball a manager (a) has to keep a set of
skills in her toolbox for but (b) needs to use rarely. For a
baseball manager, there might be one game in 30 where the skipper
is knows he's running on fumes, so has to pick his moments to
burn up a pinch hitter, use up a reliever to gain a platoon
advantage or apply the defensive replacement.

Joe Ely writes one of my favorite weblogs, Learning
About Lean, and this morning he published a super Management
By Baseball lesson about the Braves-Astros game. Joe's work is
manufacturing, lean manufacturing specifically, and when it comes
to the First Base set of skills in the MBB Model, operational management, and
managing and driving Change, Home Plate, he regularly has tons of
valuable insights.

WHEN OPTIONS VANISH
...is the the title of today's entry. I urge you to read it, but
here's a taste.

In such a long game, each
manager made numerous substitutions to try to win, both in
the late innings of regulation and then in each extra inning.
Relief pitchers, pinch hitters, pinch runners. Since baseball
requires players to leave the game once they are substituted
for, the choices got more complex as they used up available
players. The managers of both teams faced and made key
decisions.

They ran out of
options. Players were in positions they didn't
normally play. Roger Clemens, the great 43-year old
veteran pitcher, was a pinch-hitter. The Braves had Julio
Franco, the living fossil, playing first base. At age 47
(we think), Franco is older than 8 current major league
managers. The Astros had a rookie shortstop, Eric
Bruntlett, in right field.

They didn't whine. At least not about the rules.
They played the game and made the best of the situation.

They balanced the "now" with the
"future". Bobby Cox and Phil Garner had to
weigh out each decision and balance its affect on the
current situation (often one at-bat at a time) with the
impact it would have on the lineup for the remainder of
the game. And, in choosing to use Clemens as a relief
pitcher, with how even the next game might set up.

If you'v ever worked on a factory floor, you can see Joe's
filter here. The lesson works a little differently in other
endeavors, although I urge my clients to take lessons from
manufacturing because it's very accountable. Go check out Joe Ely's insight on this, and if
you want some stimulating grist for thought, check out his
archives.

EXTRA INNINGS: A FEW ADDITIONAL
OBSERVATIONS
I didn't watch the entire game; I was working and listening some
on the radio. But the baseball skill set you need to manage the
you-know-you'll-get-it-sooner-or-later-but-not-often deviation is
an game that goes beyond 10 or 11 innings. Especially with the
Tony LaRussa-inspired method for application of bullpen (prescribed rôles for set
individuals, appearing in a constrained range of innings and
order), and the tendency to carry one fewer bat off the bench
than in the old days, it fierce. Roll in that it's the National League so
the pitcher bats, setting off another opportunity around the
sixth inning on for a manager to choose to use up a batter to hit
for a pitcher in certain situations. That makes it more
resource-intensive. And then make it a playoff, where every game
is a life-and-death moment and you're unlikely to
"finesse" (sacrifice a porting of your chance in this
particular game to give yourself a better chance in multiple
future games) by trying to preserve an arm or an injured player's
body.

Once you get to the 9th inning of a tied game, the roles
polarize much more heavily between Home and Away teams. The away
team has to play for the lead, but if it's tied going into the
bottom of the inning, you can take all kinds of chances. Every
batter can (doesn't necessarily, but can) swing for the fences to
end the game quickly. The consequence of failure is low -- you
play another inning, a generally neutral outcome. The away team
doesn't have that advantage, and the home team wins more often.

In competitive endeavors outside baseball you'll see two sides
go head to head. Two big engineering firms bid against each other
on an RFP. Each knows what the other is likely to bring to the
table, one selling based on price, the other on deeper specific
experience. Two manufacturers of body armor are going head to
head for a military contract. One has superior performance, the
other has a VP of Sales who used to work for the buyer. Two soda
bottlers are trying to snare the same shelf space at grocery
store chain's stores. One has better demand, the other is willing
to pay more dollars up front as to "buy" the space.

Predictable, flexible rôles each with guidelines and
parameters, but variations. Booby Cox and Phil Garner, tangling
in a tango from which neither can release until it's over. Cool
moments.

A couple of quick observations. Garner was more aggressive
about burning up his resources, while Cox chose to preserve his,
leaking them out more gradually. In part, that goes along with
the home/away tactical guideliens. But after the three changes in the 9th didn't close the deal
and a lot of scrambling through the 13th, Garner was pretty
much spent. He emptied his six-shooter and then thrown the Colt
.45 at the opponent, retaining his advantage of the high ground
(playing at home). Cox still had a reserve or two to play with.
But I
suggest Garner chose to be more aggressive in applying resources
even taking into consideration the home/away duality. Not that Garner wasn't having fun being involved, in fact if you talked to these two, Cox would be laconic about the situation, while I'll wage a nickel Garner has spent way more time than he needed to thinking about what he'd do in the 15th inning of a playoff game. He had a blast....catchers
playing first base, double- and triple switches. To read one
enthusastic Astro fan's play by play, try Lisa Grey's.

Keep in mind as a manager outside of baseball, there are skill
sets you know you'll need sooner or later, just not
often or when. You shouldn't spend as much time polishing those,
but you do want to invest some mind time in playing out the what-
ifs. You never know when you'll get a game that runs more than 11
innings, where the guidelines change and constraints magiify to
the point where they seem like almost the entire set of
challenges you have to deal with

10/10/2005 08:48:00 AM posted by j @ 10/10/2005 08:48:00 AM

Thursday, October 06, 2005

PART I: The Sabermetrically-Challenged L.A. Angels Are All About Numbers

My sentence
is for open war: of wiles more expert,
I boast not -- John Milton, "Paradise Lost"

If there's a consistently acceptable team that appears to spit
in the eye of every one of us red-blooded sabermetric
enthusiasts, it's gotta be the L.A. Angels. And that,
compañeros, holds a great lesson or five for those who care
about strategy in endeavors beyond baseball. The Angels are a
great example of an organization finding its own model for
success based on metrics and designs of its own.

The Angels are as good a team as the New York Yankees. They
won the same number of games during the regular season, (95, each
with 67 losses). The Angels' Pythagorean W/L number (.569) was about two games better than the Yanks' (.558), a wash. As of today, the Halos
are knotted 1-1 with the Yankees in their playoff series. It
would be difficult to find two teams with outcomes so close to
each other. But the Yankees follow informed baseball wisdom,
while the Angels violate it, at least on the offense side.

The truth is not well known. Perhaps I should say I
didn't know it before I was given a generous chunk of time with
their skipper, Mike Scioscia. Scioscia, in case you doubted it,
has little love for sabermetrics types. He's very courteous about
it, but he's equally opinionated. It's not that the Angels reject
the numbers -- far from it. They use numbers few others do, to
their competitive advantage. Before I get into the numbers they
DO use, let's briefly explore three stats that are strong
indicators to those of us who adhere to the sabermetric faith.

HOW ARE THE ANGELS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER
SUCCESFUL TEAMS?
Walks are good. But the Angels don't walk, ranking 12th of 14
teams in the AL in non-intentional walks (UBB), trailed only by
the floppy, boneless Tampa Bay Devil Rays and the chronically
underperforming Detroit Tigers.

American League teams, 2005 regular
season, ranked by UBB.

TEAM

SO

BB

IBB

UBB

Boston

1036

645

34

611

NY Yankees

982

635

41

594

Oakland

812

536

22

514

Texas

1100

494

20

474

Cleveland

1086

499

33

466

Toronto

951

483

18

465

Minnesota

973

484

49

435

Seattle

978

466

50

416

Baltimore

893

444

31

413

Chicago Sox

996

433

27

406

Kansas
City

1001

423

23

400

LA Angels

846

440

51

389

Tampa
Bay

985

409

25

384

Detroit

1026

382

24

358

Teams with .500 or better records have the creamsicle-coloured
highlight, teams with losing records have the white background.
The eyeball correlation is pretty good for this year, like most.
The Angels get the fewest walks for any team with a winning
record. The Angels belie the natural trend of low-walks -->
losing teams. What's interesting is that their manager, Mike
Scioscia was a walks guy. In the sweet spot of his career, he had
really solid on-base percentages relative to his league,
combining better than mean walk rates and much lower than average
strikeout rates.

Scioscia, as it turns out, loves on-base percentage. It's just
that he doesn't have it on his roster.
The Angels don't reject on-base average as something valuable.
They just don't have an abundance of it, and therefore try to
distill and preserve every iota of value out of the amount they
do have of it. The theory being that if you can get a runner
on first in any manner, get the runner into scoring position in any
manner, optimal or not. Get runners moving with run-and-hit, steal
bases, shake up the defense.

I'll get to Scioscia's words in
Part II, after presenting the other Angel attributes that usually
accompany losing teams. Like stolen bases. In post-1992 baseball,
stolen bases are usually the bailiwick of losers.

American League teams, 2005 regular
season, ranked by SBs

TEAM

SB

CS

SB%

Net

LA Angels

159

56

0.74

47

Tampa Bay

151

48

0.76

55

Chicago Sox

137

66

0.67

5

Seattle

102

47

0.68

8

Minnesota

101

44

0.7

13

NY Yankees

84

27

0.76

30

Baltimore

82

37

0.69

8

Toronto

70

34

0.67

2

Texas

66

15

0.81

36

Detroit

66

28

0.7

10

Cleveland

62

36

0.63

-10

Kansas City

53

32

0.62

-11

Boston

45

12

0.79

21

Oakland

31

22

0.58

-13

The Angels lead the league in stolen bases, in post-1992
baseball usually the sign of a lame team. BUT...they are effective
with the tactic. I've color-coded four clusters, and the Angels
share the high-volume, high-success cluster with only the
strugglish Rays. The Chisox have a lock on the high-volume,
low-reward "cluster". The Yankees and Texas take on the
mantle of high-quality without high-volume that's probably the
most comfortable for generic sabermetric thinking. And Oakland,
Cleveland and Kansas City are both low-volume and high-cost in
their approach.

A number of the Angel stolen bases occur when the manager has
called a run-and-hit play where the batter either didn't make
contact or allowed the ball to go by based on the belief the
runner had the base stolen. I can't tell you how many, but trust
me, the Angels know the number and success rate.

WHAT DO THEY FOCUS ON TO PRODUCE
OFFENSE?
The numbers the Angel management are passionate about, and which
may be the factor that provides them an affordance for success in
lieu of on-base, are batting w/runners in scoring position (RISP)
and batting with runners in scoring position with 2 out (RISP2).
In these, they excel, compared to the American League and
compared to the Yankees. And they especially excel against the
way the produce at the plate relative to their other at bats.

From Stats, Inc., here the AL composite team batting profile
(the average):

They also track data on individual runners taking extra bases
(going from 1st to 3rd or 2nd to home on a single, from 1st to
home on a double). Opportunities, successes, times thrown out.
They value, as they do in base stealing, both quantity and
quality.

THUMBNAIL CONCLUSIONS
In spite of their 1960s offense, the L.A. Angels focus on RISP
and RISP2 in their coaching. They follow the numbers and keep
updated reports on hand. The part of their offense that really
ticks is their keeping runners in motion (opponent defenses, to
their detriment in the general case, in motion) and their batting
with runners in scoring position.

While they don't bat as well, in general, as A.L.
averages, they are comparable in RISP and RISP2. Their consistent
contact means fewer strikeouts, and not-striking-out is an
advantage with RISP and even more with RISP2. The relative value
of the walks they're missing have lower incremental value than
those walks would have in other situations. Their putting the
ball into play and successfully getting hits with runners in
scoring position in RISP2 situations results in an offense that
while less effective overall, produces a higher rate of two-out
runs relative to the league average and a better offensive team
such as the Yankees.

If you buy into the morale theory of rallies (that two-out
rallies can suck the wind out of an opponent) opponent morale
would also be a contributing factor in the Angels' success. But
this is a team that focuses on RISP and RISP2, very aggressive
baserunning (beyond just base stealing), preaches it to their
prospects and rosters, and gets it fom them. I'm not sure it's
the most durable approach, but I'm sure it's working.

As long as the team's pitching stays solid and the defense
remains a bit above average, the Angels' success with keeping
their running efficient and keeping batters delivering in RISP2
and RISP situations, they are a team that can compete with any in
the American League. That's in spite of playing against known
advantages.

BEYOND BASEBALL
This won't be a popular thing to say, but the Angel approach on
the batting side is pure Moneyball. That is, the
economics side of the argument, not the specific attributes the
Athletics front office found undervalued. If multiple mid-budget
teams are pursuing high-OB guys and steering away from the speedy
contact hitters, there will develop an overlay in speedy contact
hitters. There will develop and overlay in talent who aren't so
speedy but are trainable.

Any organization in a competitive situation can watch the
demand for specific kinds of resources correct and scoop up
overlays, BUT...

But, it's all about execution. The Angels don't aim for just
anyone with this pattern, they look for individuals that fit into
the overall pattern. They train them in the minors to focus on
the specific skills the team is looking for, they keep repeating
the objectives on the big club. Bengie Molina (slower than an
glacier in winter) has to be as alert about taking the extra base
as Chone Figgins. Everybody is on board, everybody knows the
mission and gets the resources they need to execute on it.

The Angels approach can work in any organization.

Pick a viable strategy not
everyone is following.

Create a thorough plan to
optimize the potential success of that strategy.

Train everyone top to
bottom.

Focus on what you can
do, and don't pretend you can do what you don't have the skills and resources to do.

While the strategy doesn't have to be optimal, it does
have to be viable. But the difference between success and failure
is more a function of structuring design and execution and
following up with the right training and monitoring than it is a
function of the strategy being the best. And please note, I
highlighted content of the plan. Preaching
rah-rah exhortations is very cool, but it's the content of the
strategy and its execution that's key. In most large organizations,
management preaches motivation insetad of content because (i)
it's easier -- they don't even really have to come to understand
the content themselves, and (ii) they underestimate their staff's
ability to understand. If they hire the right staff, and refine
the explanation well enough, and come to understand it themselves,
staff will understand and internalize it -- ultimately better, because
they will be the ones carrying it out.

The Angels prove you don't need the best strategy to
get into the playoffs (or win a World Series), just a viable one
with great execution and delivery.

NEXT TIME
In my next entry, I'll run some of the transcript of the
interview with Scioscia, so you can hear what he says in his own
words. I need to thank the Angel media relations staff for being
exceptionally helpful and to Scioscia for being so generous with his
time and thoughts.

10/06/2005 08:33:00 PM posted by j @ 10/06/2005 08:33:00 PM

Saturday, October 01, 2005

To get better performance from most of your contributors, you
will have to provide negative feedback sometimes. A small
minority of people who are capable of being high-performers just
need to be kicked in the rear repeatedly, but most people with
that personality quirk usually don't provide a lot of torque in
the workplace.

Others fear being confronted with their lack of perfection. A
good friend of mine has as his key junior business partner a
woman who is ultra-defensive. Perhaps "Rafaelia" had a
hypercritical parent, but she exudes this small toxic death zone
around herself that seems designed to make it massively punishing
to offer any feedback that's not positive, so that those around
her will not give any. The personal equivalent of Mohammar
Ghaddafi's Line of Death. The problem here isn't just
unpleasantness in the immediate moment -- it makes it expensive
to even make non-negative corrections. Every conversation becomes
larded up with the overhead of having to step carefully around
her potential buried anti-personnel mines or, just wading in and
wasting energy sniping back and forth. A small but guaranteed
cost in every interaction.

Most people, even the ones who are not as hyper-defensive as
Rafaelia have responses that have an emotional component, and
depending on the person, that emotion (shame, fear, remorse,
sorrow, anger, and others) can distract the recipient from being
able to fully internalize the corrective information. If you want
corrective information to correct as opposed to punish (any they
are mutually exclusive) you want total focus on the content of
your feedback. Ironically, many bosses jump to sharp anger as the
first approach for corrective feedback, usually because their own
dominant parent proffered them corrective feedback that way. This
approach will, for most recipients, be a guaranteed loser.

Giving feedback is an essential part of Second Base in the MBB Model, and sometimes
that feedback is going to be corrective. Since there is no single
technique that works for everyone, it can be a booger. Here's one
I find very interesting from a person I find really interesting.
It should work for most contributors who don't require being
beaten over the head and shamed whenever they fall short or make
a mistake (it won't work for them at all). I call it Ray Miller's
Reprimand by Indirect Percussion.

Miller has a perspective unique in post-WWII baseball for the
strength of his job experience moving back and forth between
being a pitching coach and a major league manager. His coaching
career took him through the Baltimore Oriole system during the
Paul Richards era. Those Orioles revolutionized baseball process
by combining making methods uniform throughout a minor and major
league system with an investment in human factors. The Orioles
were very early in attending to psychology as part of the overall
coaching/training effort.

Miller was a highly-honored pitching coach for some of the
great Oriole teams (1978-84), became a manager in Minnesota
(1985-86) and headed the turnaround in Minnesota's systems and
methods that led to their first-ever World Series winning team
(1987) which he was not there to share in. He chose to go back to
being a pitching coach (Pittsburgh, 1987-96, Baltimore, 1997) and
then a manager again (1998-99). He came out of retirement last
season when Oriole GM Mike Flanagan, a product of Miller's (and
of other O's coaches of that era) coaching craft asked Miller to
be the pitching coach. Flanagan had won the Cy Young Award in
1979 and hoped that Miller could do for Flanagan's young pitching
staff what he'd done for the young Oriole pitching staff when
Flanagan was coming up. He runs a small business, too, so he has
a business perspective about people management, as well.

The other unusual combination trait Miller has is he's got
enough self-confidence to take a "demotion", that is
from manager to pitching coach, a position that reports to a
manager. Most people don't have the huevos to do that, but he is
extraordinary and very sure of himself.

Miller's immediate effect on being brought on in the middle of
the 2004 season was sharp. Orioles starter ERA was 5.94 in the
part of the season before Miller was there, and 4.44 after he
arrived, a full 1.50 difference, part or much of which has to be
ascribed to his techniques. He's a winner, and we have many
lessons to learn from his craft. Here's one for the frequently
tricky moment of negative feedback.

INDIRECT PERCUSSIONMiller invites the manager to yell at him
publicly when a pitcher has earned a reprimand for sloppy
fundamentals or bad concentration. The manager turns to Miller
and describes, in whatever loud language he chooses, what the
failure was and why it was bad.

"The manager can jump around and
yell at me, and the pitchers can all see that. Then they look to
see if I jump the guy when he comes off the field, and I never
say anything. Conversely, sometimes the guy is pitching a great
game and makes a bad situation pitch, and the manager's
screaming, and I'll touch the manager on the arm in front of the
pitcher and say, 'I told him to throw that pitch'. The manager
will shut up and go sit down."

By doing this, Ray preserves respect for the pitcher, and the
pitcher sees a vivid example of his coach standing up for him.
More importantly, the pitcher and all the other pitchers get to
hear from the manager exactly what he did wrong without having it
directed at him. Corrective criticism, but not
colored by the shame or being chewed out publicly, as I said,
emotions that can distract the pitcher from focusing on the
mental aspects of the error and fixing it, which is truly the
purpose of the corrective feedback.

Emulate Miller if you have your superior's respect, and your
superior knows enough about the craft to criticize meaningfully
and you have an agreement with him to play this scene when
needed. It buys successfully imparted wisdom, an easier reprimand
for the contributor to internalize and long-term loyalty from the
contributor to you.